CURRENT COLLABORATIONS

Born last February at the famous Sacred Spirit Festival in Jodhpur, this meeting which could have seemed in the realm of the improbable, thanks to the personalities of Loup Barrow and Flute J. Jayant finally became that of the inevitable. One, by the choice of one of the most unusual instruments of the XX century, the other by his revolutionary virtuosity, are in their own way “diggers” (“those who dig”, a term very much in vogue nowadays!), being constantly in search of new sounds with this need to share a knowledge acquired in an incessant nomadic quest.

It is this quest, during a trip to Venice, that will make Loup Barrow discover the glass harp, the Seraphin (set of tuned glasses). Upon his return to France, he made his own instrument (with three 1⁄2 octaves before soon discovering the Cristal Baschet: the last polyphonic instrument designed in Paris. He would meet one of its inventors Bernard Baschet, one of the Baschet brothers, both of whom were behind this chromatic instrument in 1953, made up of, among other things, glass rods that are caressed with the fingers. The Cristal Baschet offers infinite possibilities of playing, allowing Loup Barrow to play in a wide range of styles, from classical to contemporary or minimalist music, as well as traditional music, notably in a duet with the Chinese erhu player, Guo Gan.
In this new musical approach, as was the case on the shores of the Mehrangarh Fort lake in Jodhpur, the Cristal Baschet propagates its acoustic waves, in an ethereal way, intertwining with the sharp meanders of the bansuri flute of J. Jayant. The modal context built on the art of raga, allows to decline a hallucinating sound spectrum, punctuated by this rhythmic virtuosity, almost mathematical dear to the carnatic music. The story of J. Jayanth, affectionately called “Flute Jayanth”, was born into a family of musicians as is often the case in the world of Carnatic music. From the age of five, he naturally trained on the bamboo flute in the tradition of Indian classical music (guru-shishya parampara) with his grandfather and guru, the late Kalaimamani Flute T. S. Sankaran, Jayanth has learned a unique and virtuosic fingering and blowing technique that allows him to express his music beautifully, especially in subtle lower octaves, on the thick-walled bamboo bass and contrabass flutes. Driven by this perfect pitch (“suddham” in Carnatic music), his expressive playing brings out the depth and soul of the lyrical aspects of the compositions he presents (gayaki).

Alain Weber